Death and the Transcendental Subject

This paper discusses the philosophy of death and mortality from a transcendental perspective. I first criticize the metaphysically realistic background assumptions of mainstream analytic approaches to the philosophy of death. Secondly, I defend a transcendentally idealistic approach, drawing attention to how the topic of death can be illuminated by means of the notion of the transcendental subject. Thirdly, I identify a problem in this approach: the transcendental subject needs to recognize its own mortality. Fourthly, I propose a pragmatist way out of this problem. This, however, is no way out of the general issue that mortality as a structural element of the human condition provides us with. Rather, pragmatism (joining forces with transcendental philosophy) can show us a way of living with this condition. Introduction: Metaphysical realism and “third-personal” approaches to death and mortality The naturalistic mainstream approaches in contemporary metaphysics of death, as well as their applications to ethical issues of death and dying, are based on a metaphysically realistic understanding of the relation between the self and the world. Deaths, according to this picture, are simply natural events in the natural world; my own death is no exception. Death, dying, and mortality are viewed from an objective, “third-personal”, or even theocentric perspective, a “God’s-Eye-View”. This presupposes a broadly “Aristotelian” conception of metaphysics as a general category theory; death and the mortal subject fall in their place in the categorial structure of reality. The world in which human selves live and